Mojo Magazine textual research and analysis

Mojo Magazine are a Rock music magazine published by Bauer magazines (was previously published by Emap from 1993 to 2008). Mojo mainly is known for being a magazine for covering mostly classic rock acts (even seeking frequent criticism for this) but has also covered a wide range of new rock acts such as the White Stripes and Radiohead. Mojo is overall a well respected mainstream music publication. For 2020 the ABC reported that Mojo had a circulation of 58,000 issues sold per issue proving it is a very successful music magazine.

For my textual analysis I studied their January 2020 issue featuring Liam Gallagher from Oasis.

• Main cover artist is Liam Gallagher. Someone who can be commonly considered a household name and Rock icon. Since this is a commercially published magazine it is clear they are using Gallagher as he has many fans who would want to buy a magazine featuring him hence it would likely sell many magazines maximising profit on this issue.

• The house style on the magazine features many recognisable names such as Johnny Cash, Frank Zappa, Ron Wood and Paul McCartney. This would be because similar to featuring Liam Gallagher, by featuring articles on artists that people are more likely to recognise or be a fan of, Mojo are more likely to sell more copies of their magazine and maximise profits.

• The magazine style is very conventional and sticks to the traditional house style magazine. It has a cover model who predominantly takes up the centre of the page and on the right side has cover lines for the featured articles. There is very little open space and most corners of the page are used to advertise something in the magazine. It likely takes this style so that it can appeal to a wide demographic of readers.

• The magazine features an advertisement in which it gives away a 15 track cd. This is included because they want to incentivise the reader to buy the magazine because they will also get the CD with it which is extra value for the reader. This also show's Mojo is trying to appeal to a slightly older audience of 40-60 year olds because they will be more likely to use CDs

• One of the cover lines is Liam Gallagher saying he "everyone is far too nice" this shows they are using Liam Gallagher's controversial personality to advertise the magazine because this often makes people interested in what he has to say. This shows that compared to something like Wire Magazine which only exclusively focuses on music Mojo also incorporates opinions and personality into their magazine.

• Uses a pop up to advertise the 153 reviews. Shows they are trying to advertise value for money in their magazine.

Another analysis I did was of this contents page my Mojo of Morrisey